Everyone in the compound was moving. It was not like shooting fish in a barrel. She missed more than she hit. Her adrenaline was pumping. Her small motor skills were shaky as hell. Half the time she had to hold her shot because she’d lose her focus for a second. Then she’d remind herself to breathe and aim again.
Tunnel vision-that’s what happened to her. She was concentrating so hard on what was out in front of her, that she never saw what was coming up behind her.
Dax had two goals-get to Suzi, and get to Erich Warner’s body, or rather, Erich Warner’s jacket. Screw the Sphinx. He didn’t need it for anything now that Warner was dead.
But Suzi had it, and he bet his girl had it locked down.
Another blast off the.50-cal rocked the house, shattering glass. The next round hit one of the stone walls. Goddamn, somebody needed to take Shoko out. She was on a rampage.
A few shots had come from the house, but they’d stopped a minute or so ago. There were shots still coming from up on the ridge, precision shots, one Vargas boy going down after another, and he’d sure like to know who was helping him out.
He made it to the house by fast-crawling along the edge of the compound, using the trees for concealment, until he could make his break for the deck. When he got there, he swung himself up, subgun ready to blast anybody who came out of the door.
But nobody did, and he ducked inside. At one time, about two minutes ago, the place had been beautiful. Shoko had turned it into a garbage heap. He didn’t see Suzi anywhere. There was a carbine on the floor by the door, though, and when he reached for it, he saw something else lying on the floor-a long, faceted piece of rock crystal.
He knew what it was, and when he picked it up, he got a bad feeling. He had to find Suzi, and he was well aware of the fact that Warner’s jacket was moving away from him and up the river, still wrapped around Warner’s dead body, with Shoko at the wheel.
Still, if his girl was here, he had to find her.
It took him too damn long to check every room, and by the time he finished, he realized he was in danger of being overrun by the few Paraguayans that hadn’t either run away into the jungle or been killed, and he didn’t know where Conroy Farrel had gotten off to-the guy was nowhere.
The last door he checked opened onto a dark stairwell with a deeply dank smell coming up from out of it. He didn’t hesitate. He followed the stairs down at a quick gait, feeling the air getting cooler and wetter.
“Suzi!” he called out, hoping to get an answer, and getting none.
In combat, phone calls were called communications, and though he doubted if Conroy Farrel had let her keep her phone, it was a chance.
His carbine still at the ready, he slipped his phone out of his pocket and called her number-and heard a ring. He speeded up his gait. Nobody answered the phone, but it kept ringing until he got about halfway down the stairs. Then he lost service, dammit.
At the bottom of the stairs, he came out into an underground boathouse, a cave lit by the fading sunlight coming in through its mouth, and a few lit lamps. The cave floor had been extended with a wide dock, and there was a go-fast boat tied up to it. The gate at the cave’s opening had been blown off its hinges. The place still smelled of burned metal and pulverized rock, and all he could think was Shoko and the.50. The girl had blasted her way in here, and she’d done it for one reason only-the Sphinx. His gut was telling him she’d gotten Suzi, too, if for no reason other than he didn’t think his girl would have given up the statue without a fight.
But it wouldn’t have been much of a fight.
Oh, hell no.
Moving quickly, he headed toward the mouth of the cave, and at the edge of the dock came to a sudden halt. There was something, a low, grumbling growl that made the hackles rise on the back of his neck. He’d trapped something in the corner of the cave, something wild, some animal.
He took a step back from the dark form he could see huddled up against the wall, and he exchanged his phone for a flashlight he took off his tac vest. He pushed the button on the light and stopped cold.
It wasn’t an animal. He didn’t know what or who it was, but his first guess would be Conroy Farrel-and he took another step back. The growling deepened, the creature’s wild eyes locked onto his. It was a man, purely human, but a feral human, twisted up in agony, sweat running off of it, his muscles tight, his teeth bared.
Dax had an instinct to try to help, but it was instantly overridden by his need to find Suzi, to save her.
Backing off, without taking his eyes off the guy, he made it back to the boat. He cast off and fired up the engines, and using the throttle, he reversed out of the cave. When he hit open water, he swung the prow of the boat upriver and poured on the speed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Suzi had never dreamed in all her years that she would die in Paraguay, but the writing was on the wall. She’d made a tactical error, and she was going to die for it. She hadn’t been watching her back, and she’d been caught, attacked from behind by an exceptionally strong, crazed woman with far too many knives who had all but knocked her out and dragged her down and out of the house and thrown her in the bottom of the gunboat.
This was not going to go well, and she knew it, and once again, she was trapped in far too small a space with a dead body, two this time, Erich Warner’s being one of them, she presumed. The man’s clothes were exceedingly expensive, even by her standards, and he’d been shot in the dead center of his face by an expert marksman, and that would have been Conroy Farrel, whose sole purpose had been to kill the German crime lord. And the other dead guy was a Paraguayan homeboy, she would guess. In a new twist for the day, he hadn’t been shot. No, Suzi could see the crazed woman’s handiwork from one side of his throat to the other.
If she hadn’t been so scared, she would have been sick. There was blood everywhere, the bottom of the boat awash in it-the wasteful bitch.
The Asian woman was motoring them up the river, watching the shoreline, and Suzi knew exactly what she was looking for-an open space, a break in the trees where the moonlight could shine down on them. The ceremony for immortality was not that complicated-physical contact with the statue, glinting eyes, moonlight falling on the whole show-immortality. In Warner’s case, considering his state, which was dead, a few pints of fresh blood needed to be poured over the granite Sphinx, and that magic combination would bring him back to life-resurrection.
The Asian Queen here obviously knew all of this, and Suzi didn’t have to work too hard to see what part she played in the drama-blood donor. It was ridiculous. There was a perfectly fresh extra corpse lying in the bottom of the boat, and considering the time frame they were working with, if Knife Girl hadn’t let it all run out of him, the captain’s blood would have been more than fresh enough to suffice.
But no. The bitch had miscalculated, and in Suzi’s opinion, was getting ready to miscalculate again.
Much to her surprise, and her chagrin, Suzi had lost one of the rock-crystal eyes out of the statue. Somewhere on her run, from when she’d grabbed the Sphinx off the kitchen table until Psycho Girl had coldcocked her, she’d lost the left eye, the one she’d taken out earlier but had seen Conroy Farrel put back in. It must have fallen out while she’d been running around the house with the statue, before she’d had the sense to put it back in the gray pack.
And now she was paying for her lapse in logic.
She had a good-sized bruise forming on the side of her face. She could feel it, and it hurt like hell, but she had always supposed it would hurt to be pistol-whipped. It had knocked her out cold for a while-again, dammit-and she’d come around handcuffed to the boat, with the woman frisking her with a knife, cutting her pockets, ripping seams, obviously looking for the damn eye. She’d been cut a dozen times, small nicks and a couple of deeper cuts that all stung like hell and scared her spitless.